Is perfectionism your friend or foe?

By Tunteeya Yamaoka

Recently I conducted a Facebook Live Seminar with a group called “Empowering Women in Property”. These women identified with being perfectionists and over-achievers, which helped them to accomplish results. However in getting caught up in thoughts about having to achieve impeccable outcomes, they found it difficult to engage in the present moment. Having a perfectionist inner critic, constantly judging their own and others behavior was exhausting.

Most high performing individuals would argue that the reason why they can perform at such a great standard is because they are perfectionists. However, sometimes perfectionism can be draining as nothing ever seems to be good enough. Is there a way to let perfectionism be our friend without letting it control us?

When we can learn to observe when perfectionism is present and notice when it is taking us away from what’s important to us, we are immediately gaining some separation from our thoughts, allowing us to make more choices about how we are going to let perfectionism influence our behavior.

Learning to notice and become mindful of our thoughts allows us to create some flexibility with perfectionism. We can let perfectionism support us when we want to gain results, but we can also let it go when we need to connect with what is important to us, such as our loved ones, our hobbies and our health.

Just like there are times when perfectionism can be our ally when we need to perform, there are times when it can take us away from our values. It is important to bring awareness to our thoughts and notice whether perfectionism is supporting the life we truly want to live, whether it is fulfilling our hearts greatest desires.

If perfectionism is not adding quality to your life, we can learn to change our relationship with it by accepting it as our “personal assistant”. Notice when that personal assistant is being extremely hard on you, notice your reaction to it, is it helpful or unhelpful to struggle with it?

You can simply thank your personal assistant for supporting you, because it wants to help you. It may continue to criticize you throughout the day, but you have a choice to get caught up and argue with it (you know it always wins), or simply acknowledge it and let it be.

For help with taming your perfectionistic inner critic and instead accepting it as your “personal assistant” to be thanked and listened to, or politely ignored, get in contact with me by calling Brisbane ACT Centre or email tunteeya@brisbaneactcentre.com.au

Tunteeya Yamaoka

Reference: ACT Made Simple: Dr Russ Harris

The YOLO Project

Teaching skills for Valued Living at the University of Queensland

In our last post we congratulated Professor Kenneth Pakenham on his recent national award for outstanding contribution to student learning. Dr Pakenham received this award for creating and implementing a program that teaches Acceptance and Commitment Therapy based self-care skills into the UQ undergraduate psychology student program. Learning these ACT skills helped the students handle the pressure of their studies and enables them to teach these skills to others.

Another exciting and innovative program Dr. Pakenham is involved in is the ‘YOLO project’. Short for ‘You Only Live Once’, the project’s name plays upon the idea that you should make your one life count. The driving force being the project is Shelley Viskovich, a UQ School of Psychology researcher. Mrs. Viskovich spent ten years as a practicing therapist before commencing a pHd at UQ. The YOLO project aims to teach UQ students the psychological flexibility skills they need to ‘manage stress and increase wellbeing’. The program involves only four modules of 40 minutes duration each – completed online – allowing for progress to be paused at any time.

The YOLO program is hoping to promote mental health and valued living in University of Queensland students and draws upon a wealth of university and other context based ACT research. Early interventions like this one have shown very promising results. Small interventions done early can have very significant cumulative mental health outcomes by helping people learn the skills they need before they need them. Developing resilience and flexibility before the storms of University stressors may hit. Creating programs that act as preventatives also can help with the stigma associated with looking for help.

In just 24 hours of the YOLO program received an extraordinary 2000 student enrolments. A pilot study has shown very positive results for participants across a range of mental health areas, including stress, depression, anxiety, self compassion and life satisfaction. Dr Pakenham and colleagues hope to have the data for a randomised controlled trial available by the end of 2016, to be submitted for peer-reviewed publication early in the New Year.

The YOLO program is a truly exciting application of ACT psychological flexibility clinical psychology skills practice and research to boost UQ students valued living. We hope that it may further strengthen present evidence that mental health skills can be both taught and learned universally, briefly, and online. See here for further details.

How to Lose Weight with ACT

By Dr. Nga Tran

You may be one in two Australians at any one time trying to lose weight.  Whether it’s due to a recent health scare, a hard word from your doctor, or realising you can’t do something that really matters to you.  Yet despite shows like “The Biggest Loser”, the evidence of success for people losing a meaningful amount of weight and keeping it off in the long term is very low.

You know this cycle only too well: A certain event spurs you into action; you get motivated and set a plan; you may be able to stick to it for a while; sooner or later, cravings kick in, and you start eating a few of the things you shouldn’t eat, or eat more than you intend to.  You are a rational, thinking, caring human being, and in many ways this behaviour actually makes sense – eating brings pleasure and/or eliminates unpleasant states such as cravings or boredom.

We all know cues are very powerful – if a song can bring back a memory of that first kiss at 16, think of all the associations that may be present with food.  The smell of coffee may bring craving for cake, driving a certain route we go past a particular fast food stop, watching TV may be paired with a packet of chips.  This all works at a very automatic level in your brain, and is much more powerful in influencing your behaviour than menu plans or the future risk of diabetes.

So over and over again, you (like most of us) act automatically triggered by these food cues to reduce cravings, and the longer term consequences fade out your consciousness at the moment of choosing.  And afterwards, you beat yourself up and feel guilty or hopeless.  These very emotions are unpleasant and can again be immediately diminished by food, and the vicious cycle keeps going.

Traditional weigh loss strategies teach you about nutrition, about counting calories, about distraction techniques to fight urges, and get you to keep a diary of what you eat and your weight.  In basic terms, they teach you to set specific goals and to fight your cravings and urges.  Yet even with the best programmes and intensive support, the rate of people losing a meaningful amount of weight and keeping it off is very low.

A new study shows that a different strategy called Acceptance Based Treatment achieves much higher success rates.  This study was very well designed and involved nearly 200 people.  The Acceptance Based Treatment lost 13.3% of initial weight at 1 year, compared to the best existing treatment achieving 9.8%.  This is among the largest ever success in behavioural treatment for weight loss without using an aggressive diet regime or medications (most of which have multiple harmful effects and short lasting results).

What is different about Acceptance Based Treatment?  It teaches you accept physical discomfort, such as hunger and craving, without needing to get rid of it with food.  It also teaches you to accept the reduction in pleasure associated with eating.  So rather than a battle between you and your urges, you learn to notice them come and go.  And it teaches you to connect to the values that are important to you about losing weight, rather than just focussing on the goal of losing weight in and of itself.

So, for example, if losing weight means you can run around and play sport with your children/friends, then connecting with this value enables you to be more willing ride out the discomfort.  This actually leads to you choosing differently, over and over again, and gradually form new habits and associations with food.  The reward of doing something that is in line with what you care about is an intrinsic motivator that you can always access.  You learn to be kinder and more forgiving of yourself so are less likely to beat yourself up and more able to stay on track.

These are exactly the principles and techniques we use in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy at the Brisbane ACT Centre every day with our clients.  The same principles can be applied to problems with alcohol, cigarettes, gambling, shopping, overworking.  In the same way, we help clients be more willing to tolerate anxiety, depression, traumatic memories, voices, or whatever distressing internal experiences, in the service of living their lives in a way that is really meaningful to them.

References:

Acceptance-based versus standard behavioral treatment for obesity: Results from the mind your health randomized controlled trial. Foreman, E et al, Obesity 2016

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/oby.21601/full

Advancing the revolution in the behavioral treatment of obesity. Thomas A. Wadden, Robert I. Berkowitz, Obesity Editorial 2016.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/oby.21641/full

New therapeutic treatment helps people lose more weight and keep it off – Study shows clear gains from weight-loss treatment aimed at setting goals based on personal life values. Chelsea Clark, The Obesity Society.

http://www.obesity.org/obesity/news/press-releases/new-therapeutic-treatment-helps-people-lost-more-weight-and-keep-it-off

Self-Regulation Helps Obese, Overweight Patients Shed Pounds. Acceptance-based weight loss treatment emphasizes self-appointed goals.

http://www.medpagetoday.com/endocrinology/obesity/60585

How to Become an Emotional Resilience Superhero

Life is full of challenges, some more difficult than others, it’s how we respond to those challenges that matters most. Everyone has the experience of facing a challenge that was just out of their realm of control. Facing tough times like that can make us stronger, but how can you prepare for a crisis in the easier times?

“Emotional resilience” is how readily you can cope with stresses both small and large, and how well you can adapt to difficult circumstances in our life. Resilient people tend to be happier and teaching resilience to children can prevent depression, anxiety and increase grades in school.

Developing resilience helps you keep going when challenges, sudden or expected, make the going get tough. Research shows that natural aptitude is only a part of resilience, and it’s largely a learned skill which you can cultivate to turn yourself into a stress busting super hero.

  1. Get Clear About Your Purpose.

Developing resilience is a personal journey of learning your strengths and working on weaknesses. Everyone’s journey is going to be different but one of the most useful things you can do on that journey is get clear about your motive and your purpose. Without a strong purpose driving you through adversity you’ll quit or crumble. A strong awareness of purpose works like a lighthouse guiding you through the heaviest of storms.

How do you get clear about purpose? Think about who and what you care about day to day, and how you’d like life to be in the future. Ask yourself how you’d like to behave through whatever challenges you face. What’s motivating you? What are the values you want to express right now?

2. Everyday is an Opportunity to Improve.

Practicing awareness deliberately with low to moderate daily stressors will build resilience. Developing skills of being present, emotional flexibility and keeping focus on your values and goals in relatively safe environments helps when the stress level gets dialled up.

View small conflicts and daily trials as opportunities to develop your skills as they come. Be like a scientist running an experiment, and be curious about the results. Pay full respect to the successes – and focus also on the areas that have room for improvement next time – learning opportunities!

3. Thing Big Picture.

Get in the habit of paying attention to the things are going well in your life. Remind yourself of things you’ve enjoyed, that have been worth your while, and take time to be grateful for things you’re fortunate to have, friendship, food, and shelter. Getting in this habit before you’re under a time of stress will help you to maintain a broader awareness within a crisis.

People who view their crises as insurmountable problems are less likely to thrive, whereas framing something as a challenge makes it easier to work through.

5. Let Yourself Feel Things Flexibly.

We’re all capable of feeling a dizzying array of emotions simultaneously, even feelings that are seemingly contradictory. An Acceptance and Commitment Therapy skill is learning to ‘defuse’ from thoughts and feelings and notice other feelings in your rich emotional landscape. Research by Barbara Fredrickson, PhD shows that in a crisis resilient people are able to feel both traditionally positive and negative emotions simultaneously. They allow themselves to feel upset while also being able to celebrate the good things. Contrasting to that less resilient people are in crisis all of their emotions turn negative. When challenges strike let yourself feel a broad range of emotions, not just the negative ones.

For more here’s a great post by the terrific blog Barking up the Wrong Tree that summaries research evidence about life skills which we can use in everyday life. Here’s an article on building resilience by the American Psychology Association that we used in our research for this post.

Bonus! 6: Enlist the Aid of a Professional.

The psychologists at Brisbane ACT Centre can help you develop these skills and many more – so that you’re ready to face the challenges that crop up in life. If you wanted to run a marathon you’d train before the race so that you could perform at your best, and a good psychologist can help you just the same way. Working with an emotional resilience professional in the good times to help you work on your psychological flexibility skills can make the difficult times ahead a whole lot easier.

The Purple Vault

By Claire Welshe

A clear blue sky beamed through my window the day I learned that I would never again see purple rain, at least not in the flesh.  The flesh of megastars such as Prince, it seemed, was just as susceptible to mortal vulnerabilities as the rest of us.  We are all human.  We will all suffer the same fate, eventually.  My clear blue sky day suddenly seemed a little cloudy.

Human beings are geared to strive for survival.   When our bodies become dehydrated, we feel thirsty and seek out water in order to stay alive.  When threatened, we feel fear and our bodies divert blood to our muscles to ensure we can fight or run, so we can survive.  So a reminder that no-one is immune from life’s inevitable demise can often be very unsettling.  We are neurologically hard-wired to avoid threats to our existence yet on some level we all know that at some point, even our best efforts will be futile. My cloudy day was now looking distinctly rainy.

There is some speculation that Prince had advance warning that his days were numbered.  On the weekend before his death, he reportedly proclaimed to his enamoured fans “Wait a few days before you waste your prayers on me.”  If indeed this was an ominous foreshadowing of his death, then the way in which he derived his resilience in the face of such adversity is something that we can all learn from.

As more and more snippets of his last few days are released to the public, it seems that the “artist formerly known as Prince” lived his last days loyal to his lifelong passion for music, his values surrounding creative expression and his devotion to philanthropic projects he deeply believed in, despite, or perhaps because, he knew that he didn’t have much time left.  His last moments were reportedly spent in his home recording studio, actively contributing to what is now believed to be an actual physical vault of up to 2,000 unreleased songs and videos in the basement of his Paisley Park estate in Minneapolis, enough to continue to release one album per year until well past my lifetime.  He created a rainbow to follow the rain. To follow the purple rain.

If you were told you had only one year, one week or even one day to live, how would you make each moment matter?  What would you want your “vault” of memories to contain?  How would you change the way you live today?  What is stopping you from living that life, right now?

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) can help support clients deal with the difficult thoughts and emotions that inevitably arise when facing a life limiting illness, helping them identify valued directions for their remaining time on earth and supporting them as they take committed action towards adding to the “vault” we will all leave behind.  Research shows that distilling and focussing on what is most important during the end stage of life as part of a broader ACT intervention can help manage distress and improve quality of life during this very difficult time.

The Brisbane ACT Centre now offers a home visiting service by Claire Welshe, mental health occupational therapist, for those who are unable to access the Brisbane ACT Centre due to poor health or other restrictions.  Contact us today to make an appointment.

1. Ann D. Rost, Kelly Wilson, Erin Buchanan, Mikaela J. Hildebrandt, David Mutch, Improving Psychological Adjustment Among Late-Stage Ovarian Cancer Patients: Examining the Role of Avoidance in Treatment, Cognitive and Behavioral Practice, Volume 19, Issue 4, November 2012, Pages 508-517, ISSN 1077-7229, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cbpra.2012.01.003.

(http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1077722912000132)

2. Feros DL1, Lane LCiarrochi JBlackledge JT, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) for improving the lives of cancer patients: a preliminary study, Psychooncology. 2013 Feb;22(2):459-64. doi: 10.1002/pon.2083. Epub 2011 Oct 6.

3 Steps To Finding the Right Psychologist For You

This is the first in the Brisbane ACT Centre’s two part series on finding a psychology practitioner that’s perfect for you. In this post we look at how to look for psychologists and choose between therapists. In the next segment we’ll explore what research shows makes for a great psychologist.

A wealth of clinical studies finds that psychotherapy is highly effective, and more and more modern research shows that therapy is at least as effective for treating depression and anxiety in the short term as antidepressants – without common side-effects. And psychotherapy is clearly more effective for treating depression and anxiety over the longer term.

There’s a huge number of skilled and qualified psychologists in Brisbane, so how do you choose the one that’s right for you? You’ll be working together with the psychologist that you choose, so it’s important to find someone that will be effective and the right fit for you.

  1. Word of mouth

For many people finding the right therapist starts by asking for recommendations from friends, family and their doctor. Asking people you know for a recommendation is a great way to find a capable therapist.

However some people won’t be comfortable asking friends and family for a psychologist recommendation, which is completely fine. Your own search for a psychological professional can be a very private journey.

You may also want to do some personal research instead of asking for a recommendation to choose the person that’s just the right fit for you. After doing some research you can discuss your options with your doctor, friends or family.

  1. Research

Use your favourite search engine to find websites for psychologists close to you. Look for the practical information that you’ll need, like how close the psychologists office is to your home or workplace, or if the hours are convenient for you.

Read how the psychologist describes themselves and their career, looking for clues along the way about if they’d be a good fit for you. Overall you should be trying to figure out if this is someone that you can be comfortable with. If the psychologist has a video talking about their work then use that as a way to figure out how comfortable you’d be working with them.

  1. Commitment to Understanding Modern Therapeutic Approaches

Behind the scenes the science of psychology is fractured, many psychologists rely on old and outdated therapeutic approaches that have been superseded by much more modern, evidence based approaches. It’s a good idea to look for a therapist that shows a commitment to learning, growing and being on the cutting edge of modern psychological science.

There are many schools of valid psychological science, we personally endorse Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (although we’re a bit biased!) because it’s an incredibly well researched and evidenced based approach to therapy. There are however lots of other schools of thought to explore, and provided the therapist shows that they’re committed to staying current in psychological research you’ll know you’re in good hands.

Summing Up

To summarize the first step to finding the right therapist for you are to ask friends and family (if you’d like a personal recommendation) and discuss with your doctor. Research the necessary practical information around locations, schedules and fees. Just as importantly research the more intangible information around how comfortable you would be with the therapist. And finally look to make sure that the therapist is committed to delivering the best possible treatment with the most modern and effective approaches.

Next week in part 2 in the series we’ll look at the characteristics that make an effective therapist according to scientific research. While you’re looking for the right psychologist for you take a look at our team at the Brisbane ACT Centre. Our entire team are hand picked for their warmth, professionalism and rigorous commitment to staying on top of the most effective forms of therapy.